After a decade of construction a large new reflecting telescope publicly released its first images on Monday, and they are nothing short of spectacular.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s primary mirror is 8.4 meters in diameter, which makes it one of the largest optical telescopes in the world. However, the real secret sauce of the telescope is its camera—the automobile-sized Legacy Survey of Space and Time camera—which has a resolution of 3,200 megapixels. Which is rather a lot.
The observatory is on a remote 2,682-meter-high (8,799 ft) mountain in northern Chile, a region of the planet with some of the best atmospheric “seeing” conditions.